1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains generally to video coding, and more particularly to a scalable coding framework that employs texture analysis and synthesis for efficient coding of high-resolution video.
2. Description of Related Art
One of the intents of current single layer video coding standards such as AVC/H.264 has been in producing a standard that could provide good video quality at bit rates that are substantially lower than prior standards, such as MPEG-2, H.263, or MPEG-4 Part 2, while maintaining a practical level of complexity. Further extensions in this domain led towards the development of scalable video coding approaches such as the SVC standard, where scalable video coding provides a mechanism by which video can be coded to suit a large number of different applications, or devices, operating with different resolutions. A scalable coder encodes the video into a plurality of layers, such as comprising a base-layer and at least one enhancement-layer. The base-layer should be transmitted with the highest reliability and comprises the ‘base’ upon which the enhancement-layers rely.
In the search for improving the coding efficiency of video coding standards, new technologies are currently being investigated that promise additional bit-rate savings while offering similar or improved visual quality in relation to current standards. One such technology that is gaining interest is in the field of texture analysis and synthesis.
Recent trends in video coding and perceptual evaluation have shown that the semantic meaning of a particular texture is of more importance to a viewer than providing an exact reproduction of the original texture itself. As such, if sufficiently good texture synthesis methods are provided which reproduce certain classes of textures to a reasonable degree of accuracy, then the viewer will be unable to ascertain that there is a difference in the reproduced texture, in particular, if he or she has not seen the original texture. This technique is now being exploited in the field of video coding to achieve higher gains in coding efficiency.
The majority of techniques currently available, however, employ highly complex schemes for texture analysis and synthesis. If such schemes were applied on high-resolution video data then the system would become overly complex. Also, many of the present techniques either suffer from a loss of textural structure during the synthesis stage, or require the sending of structural information as additional data/side information to preserve the textural properties, thereby increasing the rate of the coded data/bit stream. Thus, a number of shortcomings exist with these current approaches, such as requiring high processing complexity or additional overhead in terms of bit rate.
Accordingly, a need exists for a system and method of scalable video coding which provides higher quality coding without the need of high complexity processing. These needs and others are met within the present invention, which overcomes the deficiencies of previously developed video coding systems and methods.